Native to Columbia and Ecuador, the Anthurium goes by many names. Painter’s Pallet, Flamingo Flower, and Tail Flower name a few. Its brightly colored heart-shaped “flowers” stand out against equally beautiful waxy heart-shaped leaves. You commonly see it for sale in nurseries, even grocery stores. Most gardeners acquire their anthurium as a fully-grown plant. If you’re looking to propagate your anthurium, its easiest to propagate by cuttings in water. But for the patient gardener looking for a challenge, or maybe even trying to create your own hybrid, you can propagate anthuriums by seed.
I can already hear my husband laughing as I call myself a patient gardener. Incidentally, he’s the one who bought me my original anthurium back in 2015. Now, that anthurium’s progeny adorn several rooms of our house. I recount a bit of the tale of when he gifted me this original anthurium in the post: The Romantic Anthurium (Anthurium andraeanum).
Anthurium Seeds: Patience is Key
Before you start, make sure you’re ready to be in it for the long haul. Depending on the variety, anthurium seeds can take anywhere from 6 to 9 months to grow! You’ll need plenty of patience to see this through to the end.
When I decided to try propagating anthuriums by seed, I really didn’t think far enough ahead. My husband and I ended up moving houses toward the end of my experiment. Moving a pollinated anthurium plant was more of a chore than I had bargained for as the flower head became heavy with fruit. So make sure your calendar is cleared of major life events for the next 9 months so you can care for your pregnant plant properly.
About Anthurium Flowers
Before you get seeds, you need to understand the anthurium flowers. You may have noticed that I placed the word “flowers” in quotes in the introduction. That’s because the bright red, purple, white, or black painter’s palette that gives the plant one of its many names actually isn’t a flower but a spathe. A spathe is a form of bract, which is a modified or specialized leaf associated with a plant’s reproductive structure. It’s designed to be showy and draw in pollinators.
Anthurium flowers generally don’t use wind to pollinate the way some plants do. Instead, they rely on insect pollinators to spread the pollen from male to female flower-parts. Where are these flowers, if the brightly colored spathe isn’t it? You’re looking for the spadix. A spadix is the typically white or yellow part of the anthurium in the center of the spathe. This spadix hosts the actual flowers of the anthurium. There are dozens, even hundreds, of tiny flowers along the spadix in a corkscrewing spiral all along the spadix. This spiral pattern is typical of much of the plant world in its classic Fibonacci sequence. Your anthurium seeds will grow grow along this spadix from those tiny flowers.
How Flowers Emerge
When an anthurium first begins to grow flowers, the spadix is rolled up inside the red spathe, which appears as a little tube pushing its way up from the central stalk. Over the course of about a month, the flower stalk gains a height capable of reaching sunlight, when the spathe begins to unroll to release the spadix.
New spathes are waxy and vary in color throughout their lifespan as the spathe matures. On an Anthurium andraeanum, the original, young, waxy yellow spathe turns bright white as the female part of the flower emerges. After about a week, the spathe then turns yellow with pollen as the female parts of the flowers die off and the male flower-parts emerge.
Can an Anthurium Pollinate Itself to Produce Seeds?
If you only have one anthurium plant but still want to try this experiment, you can! Anthurium flowers are perfect flowers. That means they have both male and female parts. However, there’s a bit of a complication with this that you need to be aware of. Male and female parts of the anthurium flower emerge at different times. The female part of the flower appears first and produces a wet sap to trap any pollen it comes in contact with.
When that part of the flower dries up, the male parts of the flower appear and produce pollen. This is nature’s way of encouraging mingling and genetic diversity between anthuriums when they produce seeds.
That said, anthuriums do produce several flower stalks at the same time and those stalks may not be at the exact same stage of reproduction. In this case, say one flower stalk has female flowers active, but another stalk has male flowers, a successful pollination to produce anthurium seeds can occur on the same plant.
How to Breed Anthuriums to Produce Seeds
If you’re like most anthurium owners, you likely keep your anthurium plant(s) indoors. After all, anthuriums only survive winter in USDA Zones 10 or above. In the absence of pollinators, that duty falls to you, gardener. You’ll want to watch your plant carefully so you know when you have both male and female flower parts blooming at the same time.
Pollination Process
Once you have both the pollen and the female flowers ready, you can use a simple craft paintbrush to sweep the pollen from the male flowers on one spadix. The pollen will stick to the brush bristles, just like the bees knees (I couldn’t resist saying it). You can then transfer that pollen by brushing your pollen-laden brush on the female flowers of another spadix. Try to get as many of the female flowers as you can, or your anthurium breeding may be a bit lopsided.
If the flowers on the spathe have not been pollinated, the stem of the flower stalk begins to turn yellow, and the spathe begins to wilt and turn a dark red brown. When it has fully dried, the shriveled flower stalk can be easily plucked from the plant and discarded.
If, however, the flowers on the spathe have been pollinated, the spathe becomes green, grows thicker and the flowers that have received pollination begin to swell.
As I mentioned briefly earlier, pollinated anthurium flowers are very heavy with the nasciant seeds. The spathe may even begin to droop with the weight. I eventually propped up the spathe with its pregnant spadix with a small trellis to protect it when we moved.
Anthurium Seed Maturation
Anthurium seed maturation occurs very slowly. Be patient, and check in to observe, but try not to disturb the plant too much during this time. The seeds will start to mature between 6 to 9 months after successful pollination. Depending on the variety, mature seeds will be yellow, red, or black in appearance. On the Anthurium andraeanum, the seeds are a bright yellow.
Harvesting Anthurium Seeds
You’ll know when the anthurium’s seeds are ready for harvest when the stem of the spathe begins to turn brown and dry out around the seeds. This makes it easy to pop the seeds away from the spathe.
The seeds themselves are actually inside the fleshy membrane that you pluck from the dried spathe. They’re surrounded by a sticky substance, similar to pomegranate seeds. Don’t eat these seeds, though! All parts of anthuriums are poisonous, and that includes their seeds!
When all the seeds have been removed, the dried spadix resembles that of a dried corn cob husk. And the seeds themselves resemble corn kernels.
Plant Anthurium Seeds Right Away
Once you’ve removed the sticky membrane around the seeds, wash it away in a cup of water before planting the seed within. Beware that anthurium seeds are recalcitrant seeds. This means that they don’t take well to freezing or drying. So be prepared to plant them in soil straight away if you want viable plants from your months of effort.
You’re Ready to Propagate Anthuriums
I hope this guide has been helpful to you, and that you give it a try! Although I propagated only a single Anthurium andraeanum, I intend to try creating an anthurium hybrid of my own some day. Let me know if you’ve tried this and if it worked for you!
One response to “Anthuriums by Seed: The Lifecycle of an Anthurium”
[…] Of course, you can help this process along, and even create your own hybrids, by hand-pollinating your flowers. If you’re interested, I have a whole blog post on propagating anthuriums by seed. […]